Fire Engine Pizza Company has had a bricks and mortar restaurant for two years in historic Black Rock. The front door handle is a fire axe. Inside, wood fire scents the air. The place is attractively spare, with bare black tables and wood floors, a gray, black and red palette, and industrial-looking ceiling with shiny red pipes. A vintage fire department oxygen tank accents a wall. There's neighborhood feeling that encompasses families, pairs of women, guys dining alone at the big u-shaped bar, and young neighborhood hipsters snarking at a diner taking a picture of her meal (sorry, my job required it).

It lived up to the praise. Slices of sausage and beef-and-pork meatballs, and pork cooked to a soft mass, and meat-flavored tomato sauce on a soft blanket of mozzarella over a thin, crisp crust ($14.99 and $19.99) The light-textured crust, fired in the brick oven, had the speckled bottom pizza lovers love to see. The crust, purchased rather than made in-house, held up well to the heavy topping, sagging only after we did.

Sunday gravy is also served over linguine in a dish called Sunday at Carmela's, after the mother of a friend of co-owner Philip Sagneri's, who "exemplified all that Sunday gravy is supposed to be," he says.

A much lighter pizza is the margherita made with fresh, house-made mozzarella ($13.99 and $18.99). Slices of fresh, juicy tomato and pools of melted mozzarella were sprinkled with strips of fresh basil. We felt like we could eat it forever. And the crust stayed crisp. Fire Engine serves a salad pizza with tomatoes, cucumber, red onion and gorgonzola. They also make gluten-free pizza and jalapeño polenta pizza.

The house-made mozzarella is also offered as a starter, a slice dressed with lemony caper picatta vinaigrette over shaved radicchio. Rather than order salad as a starter (or a meal), I ordered the simplest salad, arugula di Parma ($8.99), with my pizza. Fresh, bright greens were tossed in lemon vinaigrette, with thin rings of red onion, and prosciutto di Parma. Caesar salad, on the day we tried it, had an overly creamy dressing and inferior bread crumbs.

To drink, there are a dozen beers on tap. Flower Power from Ithica Beer Company is a refreshing, not too heavy, IPA (7.5 alcohol by volume). On a recent afternoon the cappuccino was marred by weak coffee and over dose of cinnamon.

But Fire Engine Pizza is really about the pizza. And best of all, it serves pizza until closing.

>>Fire Engine Pizza Company, 2914 Fairfield Ave, Bridgeport, is open Monday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 1 a.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11:30 to 2 a.m.; and Sunday 11:30 to 1 a.m. Two Fire Engine pizza trucks are available for catering and events. Information: 203-333-3473 or thefireenginepizzaco.com.